The ETRAX CRIS is a RISC ISA and series of CPUs designed and manufactured by Axis Communications for use in embedded systems since 1993.[1] The name is an acronym of the chip's features: Ethernet, Token Ring, AXis - Code Reduced Instruction Set. Token Ring support has been taken out from the latest chips as it has become obsolete.

Types of chips

The CGA-1 (Coax Gate Array) was the first microprocessor developed by Axis Communications. It contains IBM 3270 (coax) and IBM 5250 (Twinax) communications. The chip has a microcontroller and various I/O's such as serial and parallel. The CGA-1 chip was designed by Martin Gren and Staffan Göransson.[2]

An Elphel Reconfigurable Network Camera based on ETRAX FS CPU and Xilinx Spartan 3e FPGA.
An Elphel Reconfigurable Network Camera based on ETRAX FS CPU and Xilinx Spartan 3e FPGA.
A FOX board LX 4+16 (4 MB flash and 16 MB SDRAM).
A FOX board LX 4+16 (4 MB flash and 16 MB SDRAM).

ETRAX

ETRAX 100LX

In 2000, Axis Introduced the ETRAX 100LX SoC which features a MMU, USB controller, and SDRAM interface. The CPU is capable of 100 MIPS. The chip is able to run the Linux kernel without modifications except for low-level support.[5] The chip's maximum TDP is 0.35 Watts. As of Linux kernel 4.17, the architecture has been dropped due to being obsolete.[6]

Specifications:

ETRAX 100LX MCM

The ETRAX 100LX MCM is based on the ETRAX 100 LX. The chip has internal flash memory, SDRAM, and an Ethernet PHYceiver. The Chip can come with 2 MB flash and 8 MB SDRAM or 4 MB flash and 16 MB SDRAM.

ETRAX FS

Introduced in 2005 with full Linux 2.6 support, the chip features:

References

  1. ^ axis.com - Axis Chip Development History Archived May 30, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ "30 years of milestones" (PDF). Axis Communications.
  3. ^ Zander, Per. "Axis Communications - A World Of Intelligent Networks" (PDF).
  4. ^ "ETRAX 100: technical specifications". 1999-01-01. ((cite journal)): Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ The linux kernel source-code under /arch/cris contained the low-level CPU-specific additions required to make the Linux kernel able to run on the ETRAX/Cris CPUs. (See for example https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/cris?h=v4.13-rc4)
  6. ^ "Linux-Kernel Archive: [PATCH 00/16] remove eight obsolete architectures".